How to Grow Your Product Subscription with Webflow and Memberstack

Among the many ways to monetize, the subscription model stands out for its potential to create a steady revenue stream and build a loyal customer base. Leveraging platforms like Webflow and Memberstack can transform this potential into a thriving reality. This guide dives into the essentials of growing your product subscription, spotlighting success stories, marketing strategies, and the indispensable tools that Webflow and Memberstack offer.

What Makes a Product Subscription Successful?

The cornerstone of a successful product subscription lies in understanding and fulfilling your customers' ongoing needs and preferences. It's about delivering consistent value that evolves with your audience, ensuring they always find something new and exciting with each subscription cycle. This approach fosters a strong, trust-based relationship between your brand and your subscribers, encouraging loyalty and word-of-mouth promotion.

You can measure product subscription success through various metrics such as subscriber count, revenue, or churn. Ultimately, a successful product subscription makes enough money to stay in business by attracting new customers at a viable rate and keeping enough of them. Let’s take a look at some examples of successful product subscriptions.

Examples of Successful Product Subscriptions

These successful products each have a well-defined niche and value proposition. They leverage data to tailor their offerings, making each subscriber feel unique and valued.

BarkBox

BarkBox is a subscription box for dogs, delivering “monthly dog goodies for good doggies.” They realized that people like to spend money on their pets and gave them another reason to do so. They’re a great example of a physical product subscription that intelligently selected a niche and clearly defined its value proposition.

Amazon Prime

You probably have an Amazon Prime subscription (or “borrow” one, no judgment). In the beginning, the only perk was fast, free shipping. Amazon Prime’s initial value proposition is an excellent example of a conceptually simple, practical innovation. Amazon convinced people to shift the shipping expense from the point of purchase to upfront and leveraged economies of scale to ship at lower per-unit rates.

Audible

Audible is an entirely digital audiobook platform that makes books more accessible to those who don’t have the time to read or prefer listening to reading. They saw and filled a need in an underserved market, as there wasn’t previously a well-coordinated effort to compile and make audiobooks available.

Marketing Your Product Subscription

Marketing is a key differentiator among competitors in the same niche. People are more likely to purchase from brands they know and trust. The following sections cover different types of marketing and tips on successfully executing them.

SEO

Optimizing your content for search engines is your first step toward visibility. Think about how often you type in an exact URL for your destination rather than searching. Searching is so common that most modern browsers’ address bars fall back on search when a valid URL isn’t found. 

SEO is a fast-moving field full of varied advice and anecdotal evidence. Effective SEO strategy varies as search engines update their algorithms and others competing for the same search results alter their approach. It’s generally best to get started with information directly from the source, such as Google’s SEO guide and Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster guidelines. Once you have the basics down, you can run your own experiments using tools such as Semrush or outsource to an expert who stays current on search trends.

Socials

Your social media presence is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and engaging directly with potential subscribers. Share behind-the-scenes content, subscriber testimonials, and exclusive sneak peeks to foster a community around your brand.

Consider your target audience and the nature of your product when deciding which platforms to share your content on. Engaging on platforms your potential customers use strategically will reduce wasted energy on platforms that are unlikely to generate leads. It’s also important to tailor your presentation per platform. For example, if you have a purely digital product, you might have difficulty sharing it on Instagram and choose to highlight customer testimonial videos instead.

Advertising

Invest in targeted advertising to reach beyond your existing audience. Platforms like Google Ads and social media offer powerful segmentation tools to help your message find the right people. There is some overlap between advertising and SEO efforts, as both involve writing compelling headlines and copy.

Also, similarly to SEO, there isn’t an upper limit on your ad spend, so be careful! Set limits, monitor your return on ad spend, and adjust accordingly. You may additionally find that your ad performance shifts over time on various platforms. The best platform for your ad spend today might not be the same tomorrow.

Monthly Newsletters

Keep your subscribers engaged and informed with monthly newsletters. Share updates, industry insights, and exclusive offers to add value on top of your product. Regularly communicating with your subscribers will increase their familiarity with your brand and maintain a valuable pipeline to use when presenting special offers.

Eventually, you may turn your newsletter into its own product offering and monetize it. Certain niche audiences, such as professionals, are more receptive to this approach than others.

Growing a Community

Foster a sense of belonging by encouraging subscribers to interact with your brand and each other. Community can exist across platforms, but it’s important to foster community wherever its found. Features like article commenting and social media engagement can transform passive customers into active community members.

Once you’ve built a community, be on the lookout for superfans. These dedicated community members can be impactful, positive advocates for your brand and products. They’re also generally great sources of feedback and beta-test candidates.

Analytics - Track and Measure Performance

You’ll need to know how your subscriber base changes over time and how much money you’re making. These metrics are available in Memberstack’s built-in Member Metrics. 

Additional metrics can help measure your return on various marketing efforts. Different advertising and social platforms have these metrics built in. You can also set up tools like Google Analytics to track conversions from various sources associated with your marketing.

If something goes wrong with one of those metrics, you’ll want more information to discover why. Sometimes, the reason is obvious in the feedback you receive from customers. For example, if large numbers of people are complaining about not being able to access your product, that would be a likely suspect for your trouble. In cases with no obvious cause, soliciting direct feedback or using tools like Hotjar to monitor user sessions can be helpful.

With Webflow and Memberstack

Your platform choice deeply affects how your business will run and how difficult it is to bring your brand vision to life. Personally, we’re big fans of Webflow due to its flexibility and quick learning curve. Webflow provides an easy-to-use design interface for websites and follows basic best practices for SEO by default. Pairing it with Memberstack will give you all the features you need to build a successful product subscription.

Tips on Growing Your Product Subscription with Webflow and Memberstack

The best way we’ve found to speed up Webflow builds is with templates. That’s why we’ve produced a product subscription template to help you get started. We covered how to set up the template in our article on how to build a product subscription template. Let’s cover tips on how to get the most out of the template once you have it up and running.

Price Your Product Appropriately

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Setting the right price for your subscription is crucial. It not only affects your profitability but also how your product is perceived in the market. When pricing your product, consider the cost of goods, operational expenses, and competitor pricing. Additionally, think about the perceived value of your subscription to your customers. Are you offering exclusive content, products, or services that justify a premium? Our template includes three pricing tiers by default so you can experiment with good-better-best pricing. Combine pricing tiers and discounts to find what maximizes customer acquisition and retention.

Use a Scalable Foundation

Automation is a catalyst that will allow your business to grow without your overhead spiralling out of control. Without automation, every order of magnitude customer growth creates a proportional increase in operational overhead. Before you know it, you’re managing hundreds or thousands of customer accounts manually and don’t have enough time to focus on continuing to grow your business.

It’s important your platform includes automation or is at least automation-ready. That’s why our template includes features like self-serve account dashboards for your customers and automatic Slack notifications for orders. We extend your Webflow site to be more than just a website – it becomes a platform you can use to run your business.

Set Up Your Marketing

Effective marketing is essential to attracting and retaining subscribers. Our template comes with plenty of marketing extras to help you get started.

SEO

Fortunately, Memberstack covers most of the SEO basics by either making them defaults or warning you about them while you’re customizing our template’s marketing site. You might receive warnings about SEO errors like oversized images, missing alt text, or suboptimal heading structure.

Once you have the basics down, you’re ready to start ranking for terms your target audience searches for! You can run your own SEO experiments with content published through our template’s included blog collection or outsource to have a specialist design and run your experiments.

Newsletter

A newsletter lets you consistently communicate with your customers and leads, letting them know about the latest developments and deals associated with your product. Our template includes a newsletter collection that is connected to Mailchimp by default. You can use it to build brand awareness, nurture leads, and cross-sell existing customers!

Advertising

If you need to reach potential customers now, you may consider advertising. Advertising has the advantages of reaching potential customers much sooner than SEO and being reusable across more channels. However, the downside is that your ads stop reaching people when you stop paying for them. 

There are many platforms and methods to advertise. Should you choose to advertise, we recommend learning what platform(s) your audience uses and focusing your efforts there.

Monitor Your Key Metrics

To truly understand how your subscription service is performing, you’ll need to track the right metrics. Key performance indicators such as churn rate, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and monthly recurring revenue will give you a clear picture of your business health. 

Memberstack’s Member Metrics will give you what you need to measure churn rate, lifetime value, and monthly recurring revenue. To measure customer acquisition cost, you’ll need to track which marketing effort acquires each customer using a tool like Google Analytics. 

Regular monitoring and analysis enable you to make informed decisions that can lead to better product adjustments, enhanced customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, business growth.

Be Aware of the Challenges of Creating a Product Subscription

While the right strategy and choice of platform make creating a product subscription easier, it’s still full of challenges. There are variables that you won’t be able to control, such as competitors, market conditions, and legislation.

Know Your Competitors and What They’re Doing to Promote

Your competitors are after the same market share as you and are likely working just as hard to get it. Competitors can actually be a good sign, though! Their participation in the market signals that they also believe there’s a business opportunity and can be evidence of demand in your niche.

Still, you’ll need to outmaneuver your competitors to capture that demand. To do so, you’ll need to stay informed about your competitors’ strategies. Understanding their offerings and marketing tactics can help you differentiate your subscription and highlight unique value propositions.

Market Conditions

Most businesses don’t have the privilege of creating market conditions; they merely participate in them. The market is all the people you might sell to and determines how much demand there is for your product. If something affects enough of the people who form the market, you may experience a significant shift in demand or customer preference. Paying attention to trends that are likely to affect your leads and customers can help you detect market shifts early enough to respond.

Legislation

Governments feel increasingly responsible for protecting consumers and privacy. This can lead to legislative restrictions on businesses, such as limits on the types of products that can be sold, mandates on how consumer data must be collected and managed, and taxes on certain classes of products.

At Memberstack, we responded to concerns about consumer privacy by becoming SOC2 compliant and allowing our customers to use their auth of choice, such as social auth. In any case, it’s worth doing some research, so you’re aware of legislative requirements in your niche.

Memberstack + Product Subscription Template Showcase Study

Explore a case study of a subscription service that successfully utilized the Memberstack and Webflow combination. This real-world example will provide insights into overcoming challenges and leveraging platform strengths for substantial growth.

Summarize Key Points

Webflow and Memberstack are great tools for building and growing your product subscription business. This guide has walked you through essential steps like setting the right price, using effective marketing techniques, and managing your service efficiently with the right tools. Both Webflow and Memberstack provide easy-to-use features that help make your website attractive and smooth your subscription process, ensuring your customers stay happy and engaged. Remember, keeping an eye on important metrics helps you tweak your strategies as needed, ensuring you stay ahead in the competitive market. By embracing these tools and tips, you're well on your way to developing a thriving subscription service that consistently meets your customers' needs.